Fix Cordova issue with Gradle Wrapper missing From Android SDK in MAC.

Out of the sudden I was not able to build and run my cordova projects on my android phone by getting “Error: Could not find gradle wrapper within Android SDK. Might need to update your Android SDK.” .

It was not a normal SDK issue. after looking around it turned out that Google has changed the location of gardle wrapper in their sdk which was causing cordova not being able to find it. thus trying to run / build the apk was giving out the below output:

Blame is on Google but it seems Apache has fixed this issue in the next version of android-platform for cordova. so if you are one of the victims of errors above you can do this to solve your problem.

lets hope this helps some people out there, stuck searching over a solution like me.

Reindex Spotlight and All My Files

Spotlight and All My Files can be a real time saver tool on mac but if you are a developer with lots of junk scripts within your project that can go messy. luckily we are able to exclude folders and files in spotlight privacy settings, but adding them to the privacy section will not immediately remove them from spotlight index.

The solution to this is to manually force spotlight to rebuild the index by executing following command in terminal:

running this alone is not enough tough. make sure you restart your mac and it should help with spotlight respecting your privacy setting.

Cleanup!

recently I have been experiencing few important breakthrough moments of my life, which led me to look at things from a different perspective, thus many things that used to fit in my previous believe system are now wrong.

So I have decided to remove some of the older posts of my blog which I no longer agree with their contents.

with the hope that no one ever is in need to read those old material, I would like to wish you all a great weekend.

removing wordpress malware infecting js files.

A recent WordPress malware is targeting WordPress websites by injecting a piece of malicious code into every single JavaScript files (mostly libraries specially Jquery) which acts maliciously by redirecting the visitors to advertising affiliate sites.

Example injected code:

Well I came to know about this when a client approached me to clean his hacked website. after looking for this pattern within the files on his WordPress directory I came to find that over 600 Javascript files were injected with the code above.

I have gotten the above result by doing a grep in the public_html folder. following command was used to do a recursive grep looking for matching malicious variable name:

looking at the above commands result I found a file named db.php was uploaded to one of the plugins folder which a simple get request to that php file would case of that mass injection to all javascript files.

now lets get rid of the bad stuff in all files by using sed in combination of grep command as below:

This will remove the pattern from each single file that contains it.

 

Run PHP codes on the fly using phpExec

phpExec is a small tool I did to execute php snippets on the fly. Basically it is like jsfiddle for php which should be hosted by yourself.

phpExec is a simple script written in php which provides an in-browser editor to write and run php codes. the only requirement would be having php binaries on your machine. you can either use the built in php server functionality shipped with phpExec or place the copy in your web server folder and access it locally.

with phpExec you do not have any limitation on which functions that you can use, so you can even kill your machine with your code if you wish to.

Up and running phpExec:

To get started with phpExec simply download the repository in github and run composer install within the folder to download the required dependencies.

Once you have the folder downloaded you can place it on your local webserver and go to phpExec editor without any additional configuration.

While that would be the fastest way to up and run phpExec, you also could use the phpexec command line utility to run the app on php built-in server.

Running phpexec on the built-in web server would let you to modify the php.ini variables easily by editing the file shipped in the root folder of the project.

to start try running:

to run phpexec on the built in server simply use the command

This will run phpExec on localhost:8000 by default. as an additional argument you can pass host and port number to the serve command.

you can also use includes in phpExec. running phpexec make:include command will create a folder and a file within the root directory named as includes/ & includes.php.

once this is done you can add any custom class or php files in the includes folder and reference them in the includes.php .

Also remember symfony var_dumper is already loaded with the page. you can use the dump function anytime within your snippets.

phpexec official page | phpexec github page